The Moor's Last Sigh (12 page)

love-songs. Aurora opened her shutters, and threw flowers; then the water from the flower-vase; and finally the vase itself. All three scored direct hits. The vase, a heavy piece of stoneware, struck Abraham on his left ankle, breaking it. He was taken, wet and yowling, to hospital, and thereafter did not try to change her mind. Their lives moved along diverging paths. After the episode of the stone vase, Abraham always walked with a slight limp. Misery was etched in every line of his face, misery dragged down the corners of his mouth and damaged his good looks. Aurora continued, contrastingly, to blossom. Genius was being born in her, filling the empty spaces in her bed, her heart, her womb. She needed no-one but herself. She was absent from Cochin from most of the war years, at first on long visits to Bombay, where she met, and was taken up by, a young Parsee, Kekoo Mody, who had begun dealing in contemporary Indian artists--not, at the time, a very lucrative field--from his home on Cuffe Parade. Limping Abraham did not accompany her on these trips; and when she left, her invariable parting words were, 'Okay, fine, Abie! Mindofy the store.' So it was in his absence, away from his lamed, hangdog expression of unbearable longing, that Aurora Zogoiby grew into the giant public figure we all know, the great beauty at the heart of the nationalist movement, the loose-haired bohemian marching boldly alongside Vallabh-bhai Patel and Abul Kalam Azad when they took out processions, the confidante--and, according to persistent rumours, mistress--of Pandit Nehru, his 'friend of friends', who would later vie with Edwina Mountbatten for his heart. Distrusted by Gandhiji, loathed by Indira Gandhi, her arrest after the Quit India resolution of 1942 made her a national heroine. Jawaharlal Nehru was jailed, too, in Ahmadnagar Fort, where in the cinquecento the warrior-princess Chand Bibi had resisted the armies of the Mughal Empire--of the Grand Mughal Akbar himself. People began saying that Aurora Zogoiby was the new Chand Bibi, standing up against a different and even more powerful Empire, and her face began to appear everywhere. Painted on walls, caricatured in the papers, the maker of images became an image herself. She spent two years in Dehra Dun District Jail. When she emerged she was twenty years old, and her hair was white. She returned to Cochin, translated into myth. Abraham's first words to her were: 'Store is in good shape.' She nodded briefly, and went back to work. Some things had changed on Cabral Island. During Aurora's jail term, Aires da Gama's long-time lover, the man known to us as Prince Henry the Navigator, had fallen seriously ill. He was found to be suffering from a particularly pernicious strain of syphilis, and it soon became clear that Aires, too, had been infected. Syphilitic eruptions on his face and body made it impossible for him to leave home; he became gaunt of body and hollow of eye and looked two decades older than his forty-odd years. His wife Carmen, who had long ago threatened to kill him for his infidelities, came instead to sit beside his bedside. 'Look what happened to you, my Irish-man,' she said. 'You're going to die on me or what?' He turned his head on the pillow and saw nothing but compassion in her eyes. 'We better get you well,' she said, 'or who am I going to dance with the rest of my life? You,' and here she made the briefest of pauses, and her colour heightened dramatically, 'and your Prince Henry, too.' Prince Henry the Navigator was given a room in the house on Cabral Island, and in the months that followed Carmen, with an inexhaustible determination, supervised the two men's treatment by the finest and most discreet--because most highly paid--specialists in town. Both patients slowly recovered; and the day came when Aires, sitting out in the garden in a silk dressing-gown with Jawaharlal the bulldog and drinking a fresh lime-water, was visited by his wife, who suggested, quietly, that there was no need for Prince Henry to move out. 'Too many wars in this house and outside it,' she told him. 'Let us make at least this one three-cornered peace.' In the middle of 1945, Aurora Zogoiby reached adulthood. She spent her twenty-first birthday in Bombay, without Abraham, at a party given for her by Kekoo Mody and attended by most of the city's artistic and political luminaries. At that time the British had released the Congress prisoners, because new negotiations were in the air; Nehru himself had been freed, and sent Aurora a long letter from a house called Armsdell in Simla, apologising for his absence from her celebrations. 'My voice is very hoarse,' he wrote. 'I can't make out why I attract these crowds. Very gratifying, no doubt, but also very trying and often irritating. Here in Simla I have had to go out to the balcony and verandah frequently to give darshan. I doubt if I shall ever be able to go out for a walk because of crowds following, except at dead of night... You should be grateful that I have spared you this experience by staying away.' As a birthday present, he sent her Hogben's Science for the Citizen and Mathematics for the Million, 'to leaven your artistic spirit with a little of the other side of the mind'. She immediately gave the books to Kekoo Mody, with a little grimace. 'Jawahar is keen on all this boffin-shoffin. But I am a single-minded girl.' As for Flory Zogoiby: she was still alive, but had grown a little strange of late. Then, one day near the end of July, she was found crawling around the Mattancherri synagogue floor on her hands and knees, claiming that she could see the future in the blue Chinese tiles, and prophesying that very soon a country not far from China would be eaten up by giant, cannibal mushrooms. Old Moshe Cohen had the sad duty of relieving her of her duties. His daughter Sara--still a spinster- had heard of a church near the sea in Travancore where mentally troubled people of all religions had started going, because it was thought to have the power of curing madness; she told Moshe she wanted to take Flory there, and the chandler agreed to pay all the expenses of the trip. Flory spent her first day sitting in the dust of the compound outside the magic church, drawing lines in the dirt with a twig, and talking volubly to the invisible, because non-existent, grandson by her side. On the second day of their stay, Sara left Flory alone for an hour while she walked along the beach and watched the fishermen in their longboats come and go. When she returned there was pandemonium in the church compound. One of the madmen assembled there had committed fiery suicide by pouring petrol over himself at the foot of the life-sized figure of Christ crucified. When he struck the fatal match the whoosh of flame had licked murderously at the hem of an old lady's floral-printed skirt, and she, too, had been engulfed. It was my grandmother. Sara brought the body home, and it was laid to rest in the Jewtown cemetery. Abraham remained by her graveside for a long time after the funeral, and when Sara Cohen took his hand, he did not draw it away. A few days later a giant mushroom cloud ate the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and on hearing the news Moshe Cohen the chandler burst into hot, bitter tears. They have almost all gone now, the Jews of Cochin. Less than fifty of them remaining, and the young departed to Israel. It is the last generation; arrangements have been made for the synagogue to be taken over by the government of the State of Kerala, which will run it as a museum. The last bachelors and spinsters sun themselves toothlessly in the childless Mattancherri lanes. This, too, is an extinction to be mourned; not an extermination, such as occurred elsewhere, but the end, nevertheless, of a story that took two thousand years to tell. By the end of 1945, Aurora and Abraham had left Cochin and bought a sprawling bungalow set amid tamarind, plane and jack-fruit trees on the slopes of Malabar Hill, Bombay, with a steeply terraced garden looking down on Chowpatty Beach, the Back Bay and Marine Drive. 'Cochin is finished, anyway,' Abraham reasoned. 'From a strictly business point of view the move makes complete sense.' He left hand-picked men in charge of the operation down South, and would continue to make regular inspection trips over the years... but Aurora needed no reasoned arguments. On the day they moved in she went to the look-out point where the garden's terracing ended in a vertiginous drop towards black rocks and foaming sea; and at the top of her voice she out-screamed the wheeling chils for joy. Abraham shyly waited some yards back, hands clasped before him, looking for all the world like the duty manager he once was. 'I hope so that the new locale will prove beneficial to your creative process,' he said with painful formality. Aurora came running towards him and leapt into his arms. 'Creative process you're after, is it?' she demanded, looking at him as she had not looked for years. 'Then come on, mister, let's go indoors and create.'

II

MALABAR MASALA

ONCE A YEAR, MY mother Aurora Zogoiby liked to dance higher than the gods. Once a year, the gods came to Chowpatty Beach to bathe in the filthy sea: fat-bellied idols by the thousand, papier-mache effigies of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha or Ganpati Bappa, swarming towards the water astride papier-mache rats--for Indian rats, as we know, carry gods as well as plagues. Some of these tusk'n'tail duos were small enough to be borne on human shoulders, or cradled in human arms; others were the size of small mansions, and were pulled along on great-wheeled wooden carts by hundreds of disciples. There were, in addition, many Dancing Ganeshas, and it was these wiggle-hipped Ganpatis, love-handled and plump of gut, against whom Aurora competed, setting her profane gyrations against the jolly jiving of the much-replicated god. Once a year, the skies were full of Colour-by-De Luxe clouds: pink and purple, magenta and vermilion, saffron and green, these powder-clouds, squirted from re-used insecticide guns, or floating down from some bursting balloon-cluster wafting across the sky, hung in the air above the deities 'like aurora-not-borealis-but-bombayalis', as the painter Vasco Miranda used to say. Also sky-high above crowds and gods, year after year--for forty-one years in all--fearless upon the precipitous ramparts of our Malabar Hill bungalow, which in a spirit of ironic mischief or perversity she had insisted on naming Elephanta, there twirled the almost-divine figure of our very own Aurora Bombayalis, plumed in a series of dazzle-hued mirrorwork outfits, outdoing in finery even the festival sky with its hanging gardens of powdered colour. Her white hair flying out around her in long loose exclamations (O prophetically premature white hair of my ancestors!), her exposed belly not old-bat-fat but fit-cat-flat, her bare feet stamping, her ankles a-jingle with silver jhunjhunna bell-bracelets, snapping her neck from side to side, speaking incomprehensible volumes with her hands, the great painter danced her defiance, she danced her contempt for the perversity of humankind, which led these huge crowds to risk death-by-trampling 'just to dumpofy their dollies in the drink,' as she liked incredulously, and with much raising of eyes to skies and wry twisting of the mouth, to jeer. 'Human perversity is greater than human heroism'--jingle-jangle!--'or cowardice'--th-th-thump!--'or art,' my dancing mother declaimed. 'For there are limits to these things, there are points beyond which we will not go in their name; but to perversity there is no limit set, no frontier that anyone has found. Whatever today's excess, tomorrow's will exceed-o it.' As if to prove her belief in the polymorphous power of the perverse, dancing Aurora became, over the years, a star attraction of the event she despised, a part of what she had been dancing against. The crowds of the devout--wrongly but incorrigibly--saw their own devotion mirrored in her swirling (and faithless) skirts; they assumed she, too, was paying homage to the god. Ganpati Bappa morya, they chanted, jigging, amid the blaring of cheap trumpets and giant conches and the hammer-blows of drug-speedy drummers with egg-white eyes and mouths stuffed with the appreciative banknotes of the faithful, and the more scornfully the legendary lady danced on her high parapet, the further above it all she seemed to herself to be, the more eagerly the crowds sucked her down towards them, seeing her not as a rebel but as a temple dancer: not the scourge, but rather the groupie, of the gods. (Abraham Zogoiby, as we shall see, had other uses for temple dancers.) Once, in a family quarrel, I reminded her angrily of the many newspaper reports of her assimilation by the festival. By that time Ganesha Chaturthi had become the occasion for fist-clenched, saffron-headbanded young thugs to put on a show of Hindu-fundamentalist triumphalism, egged on by bellowing 'Mumbai's Axis' party politicos and demagogues such as Raman Fielding, a. k. a. Mainduck ('Frog'). 'You're not just a tourist sight now,' I gibed. 'You're an advert for the Beautification Programme.' This attractively-named MA policy involved, to put it simply, the elimination of the poor from the city's streets; but Aurora Zogoiby's armour-plating was too strong to be pierced by so crude a thrust. 'You think I can be squashed by gutter pressure?' she howled, dismissively. 'You think I can be dirtified by your black tongue? What is this Mumbo's Jumbos fundo foolery to me? I-tho am up against a greater opponent: Shiva Nataraja himself, yes, and his big-nosed holy-poly disco-baby too--for years I have been dancing them off the stage. Watch on, blackfellow. Maybe even you will learn how to whirl-up a whirlwind, how to hurry-up a hurricane -yes! How to dance up a storm.' Thunder, right on cue, rolled overhead. Fat rain would soon start tumbling from the sky. Forty-one years of dancing on the day of Ganpati: she danced without a care for the danger of it, without a downward glance towards the barnacled, patient boulders gnashing below her like black teeth. The very first time she emerged from Elephanta in full regalia and began her cliffedged pirouettes, Jawaharlal Nehru himself begged her to desist. This was not long after the anti-British strike by the navy in Bombay harbour, and the supporting shutdown in the city, the hartal, had ended at Gandhiji and Vallabhbhai Patel's joint request, and Aurora did not fail to get in her little dig. 'Panditji, Congress-tho is always chickening out in the face of radical acts. No soft options will be takeofied round here.' When he continued to plead with her she set him a forfeit, saying she would only descend if he recited from memory the whole of'The Walrus and the Carpenter'; which, to general admiration, he did. As he helped her down from her dizzy balustrade, he said, 'The strike was a complex matter.' 'I know what I think about the strike,' she retorted. 'Tell me about the poem.' At which Mr Nehru flushed heavily and swallowed hard. 'It is a sad poem,' he said after a moment, 'because the oysters are so young; a poem, one could say, about the eating of children.' 'We all eat children,' my mother rejoined. This was about ten years before I was born. 'If not other people's, then our own.' She had four of us. Ina, Minnie, Mynah, Moor; a four-course meal with magic properties, because no matter how often and how heartily she tucked in, the food never seemed to run out. For four decades, she ate her fill. Then, dancing her Ganpati dance for the forty-second time at the age of sixty-three, she fell. A thin, salivating tide washed over her body, as the black jaws went to work. By that time, however, although she was still my mother, I was no longer her son. At the gate to Elephanta stood a man with a wooden leg, propped against a crutch. If I close my eyes it is still easy to conjure him up: that simple Peter at the doors of an earthly Paradise, who became my personal cut-price Virgil, leading me down to Hell--to the great city of Hell, Pandaemonium, that dark-side, through-the-looking-glass evil twin of my own and golden city: not Proper, but Improper Bombay. Beloved monopod guardian! The parents in their lingo-garbling way called him Lambajan Chandiwala. (It seems they had become infected by Aires da Gama's habit of nicknaming the world.) In those days many more people would have understood the inter-lingual joke: lamba, long; jan, sounds like John, chandi, silver. Long John Silverfellow, terrifyingly hairy-faced but literally and metaphorically as toothless as the day he was born, grinding paans between his betel- or blood-red gums. 'Our private pirate,' Aurora called him, and yes, you guessed it, there was normally a green clipped-winged Totah squawking obscenities on his shoulder. My mother, a perfectionist in all things, arranged for the bird; would settle for nothing less. 'So what point in a pirate if no parrot?' she'd enquire, arching her eyebrows and twisting her right hand as if it held an invisible doorknob; adding, lightly, and scandalously (for it was not done to make lewd jokes about the Mahatma): 'Might as well have had the little man without the loincloth.' She tried hard to teach the parrot pirate-speak, but it was a stubborn old Bombay bird. 'Pieces of eight! Me hearties!' my mother shrieked, but her pupil maintained a mutinous silence. However, after years of such persecution Totah gave in and snapped, bad-temperedly: 'Peesay--safed--hathi!' This remarkable utterance, translating approximately as mashed white elephants, became the family's oath of choice. I was not present at the occasion of Aurora Zogoiby's last dance, but many who were later testified that the parrot's magnificent curse trailed after her, diminuendo, as she plummeted to her doom: 'Ohhh... Mashed White Elephants,' my mother howled before hitting the rocks. Next to her body, borne towards her on the tide, was a broken effigy of Dancing Ganesha. But that was not what she had meant at all. Totah's utterance had a profound effect upon Lambajan Chandiwala also, for he--like so many of us--was a man with elephants on the brain; after the parrot spoke up, Lamba recognised the presence upon his shoulder of a kindred spirit, and opened up his heart thereafter to that intermittently oracular, but more often taciturn and (if the truth be told) irascible and fucking awful bird. Of what isles of treasure did our parroted pirate dream? Chiefly and most often he spoke of the real Elephanta. To the Zogoiby children, who were being educated beyond the point at which it was possible to see visions, Elephanta Island was nothing, a hilly lump in the Harbour. Before Independence--before Ina, Minnie and Mynah--people could go out there if they got hold of a boat and were willing to brave the possibility of snakes &c.; by the time I arrived, however, the island had long been tamed and there were regular motor-launch excursions from the Gateway of India. My three big sisters were bored by the place. So for my child-self as it squatted beside Lambajan in the afternoon heat Elephanta was anything but a fantasy island; but for Lambajan, to hear him tell it, it was the land of milk and honey itself. 'Once in that place there were elephant kings, baba,' he confided. 'Why do you think-so god Ganesha is so popular in Bombay City? It is because in the days before men there were elephants sitting on thrones and arguing philosophy, and it was the monkeys who were their servants. It is said that when men first came to Elephanta Island in the days after the elephants' fall they found statues of mammoths higher than the Qutb Minar in Delhi, and they were so afraid that they smashed up the whole lot. Yes, men wiped away the memory of the great elephants but still not all of us have forgotten. Up there in Elephanta in the hills is the place where they buried their dead. No? Head is shaking? See, he does not believe us, Totah. Okay, baba. Forehead is frowning? Then look at this!' And here to much parroty noising he produced--what else, what else, O my nostalgic heart?--a crumple of cheap paper, which even the boy Moor could see was not in the least bit ancient. It was, of course, a map. 'One great elephant, maybe the Great Elephant, hides up there still, baba. I have seen what I have seen! Who else do you think bit away my leg? And then in his grandness and his scorn he let me crawl bleeding down the jungly hill and into my little boat. What-what I saw! Jewels he guards, baba, a hoard greater than the khazana of the Nizam of Hyderabad himself.' Lambajan accommodated our piratical fantasy of him--for naturally my mother the great explainer had made sure he understood his nickname--and in doing so constructed a dream of his own, an Elephanta for Elephanta, in which, as the years passed, he appeared more and more deeply to believe. Without knowing it, he connected himself to the legends of the da Gama-Zogoibys, in which hidden jewel-boxes were a prominent feature. And thus Malabar Coast masala found its yet-more-fabulous counterpart on Malabar Hill, as was perhaps inevitable, because no matter what pepper'n'spices goings-on there might be or have been in Cochin, this great cosmopolis of ours was and is the Central Junction of all such tamashas, and the hottest tales, the juiciest-bitchiest yarns, the most garish and lurid not-penny-but-paisa-dreadfuls, are the ones walking our streets. In Bombay you live crushed in this crazy crowd, you are deafened by its blaring horns of plenty, and--like the figures of family members in Aurora's Cabral Island mural -your own story has to shove its way through the throngs. Which was fine by Aurora Zogoiby; never one for a quiet life, she sucked in the city's hot stenches, lapped up its burning sauces, she gobbled its dishes up whole. Aurora came to think of herself as a corsair, as the city's outlaw queen. 'In this residence it's the Jolly Roger we flyofy,' she declared repeatedly, to her children's embarrassment and ennui. She actually had one made up by her tailor and handed it to the chowkidar. 'Come on quick, Mister Lambajan! Run-o it up the flagstaff and let's see who-who salutes.' As for me, I did not salute Aurora's skull-and-crossbones; was not, in those days, at all the piratical type. Besides, I knew how Lambajan had really lost his leg. The first point to note is that people's limbs got detached more easily in those days. The banners of British domination hung over the country like strips of flypaper, and, in trying to unstick ourselves from those fatal flags, we flies--if I may use the term 'we' to refer to a time before my birth--would often leave legs or wings behind, preferring freedom to wholeness. Of course, now that the sticky paper is ancient history, we find ways of losing our limbs in the struggle against other equally lethal, equally antiquated, equally adhesive standards of our own devising.--Enough, enough; away with this soap-box! Unplug this loud-hailer, and be still, my wagging finger!--To continue: the second essential piece of info in the matter of Lambajan's leg concerns my mother's window-curtains; the fact, I mean to say, that there were gold-and-green curtains, kept permanently closed, on the rear windscreen and back windows of her American motor car... In February 1946, when Bombay, that super-epic motion picture of a city, was transformed overnight into a motionless tableau by the great naval and landlubber strikes, when ships did not sail, steel was not milled, textile looms neither warped nor woofed, and in the movie studios there was neither turnover nor cut--the twenty-one-year-old Aurora began to zoom around the paralysed town in her famous curtained Buick, directing her driver Hanuman to the heart of the action, or, rather, of all that grand inaction, being set down outside factory gates and dockyards, venturing alone into the slum-city of Dharavi, the rum-dens of Dhobi Talao and the neon
fleshpots of Falkland Road, armed only with a folding wooden stool and a sketchbook. Opening them both up, she set about capturing history in charcoal. 'Ignore-o me,' she commanded the open-mouthed strikers whom she sketched at high speed as they picketed, whored and drank. 'I-tho am here just-like-that; like a lizard on the wall; or call me a doodling bug.' 'Crazy woman,' Abraham Zogoiby marvelled many years later. 'Your mother, my boy. Crazy as a monkey in a monkey-puzzle tree. God only knows what she thought. Even in Bombay it is no small thing for unaccompanied ladies to sit in the public thoroughfare and stare men in the face, to go into bad-area gambling dens and get out a portrait pad. And a doodle-bug, remember, was a bomb.' It was no small thing. Burly goldtooth stevedores accused her of trying to steal their souls by literally drawing them out of their bodies, and striking men of steel suspected that in another, secret, identity she might be a police spy. The sheer strangeness of the activity of art made her a questionable figure; as it does everywhere; as it always has and perhaps always will. All this and more she overcame: the jostlings, the sexual menace, the physical threats were all stared down by that level, unyielding gaze. My mother always possessed the occult power of making herself invisible in the pursuit of her work. With her long white hair twisted up into a bun, dressed in a cheap floral-print dress from Crawford Market, she quietly and indomitably returned day after day to her chosen scenes, and in slow steps the magic worked, people stopped noticing her; they forgot that she was a great lady descending from a car that was as big as a house and even had curtains over its windows, and allowed the truth of their lives to return to their faces, and that was why the charcoal in her flying fingers was able to capture so much of it, the face-slapping quarrels of naked children at a tenement standpipe, the grizzled despair of idling workers smoking beedis on the doorsteps of locked-up pharmacies, the silent factories, the sense that the blood in men's eyes was just about to burst through and flood the streets, the toughness of women with saris pulled over their heads, squatting by tiny primus stoves in pavement-dwellers' jopadpatti shacks as they tried to conjure meals from empty air, the panic in the eyes of lathi-charging policemen who feared that one day soon, when freedom came, they would be seen as oppression's enforcers, the elated tension of the striking sailors at the gates to the naval yards, the guilty-kiddie pride on their faces as they munched channa at Apollo Bunder and stared out at the immobilised ships flying red flags in praise of revolution as they lay at anchor in the Harbour, the shipwrecked arrogance of the English officers from whom power was ebbing like the waves, leaving them beached, with no more than the strut and posture of their old invincibility, the rags of their imperial robes; and beneath all this was her own sense of the inadequacy of the world, of its failure to live up to her expectations, so that her own disappointment with reality, her anger at its wrongness, mirrored her subjects', and made her sketches not merely reportorial, but personal, with a violent, breakneck passion of line that had the force of a physical assault. Kekoo Mody hastily rented a hall in the Fort district and put up these sketches, which came to be known as her 'Chipkali' or lizard pictures, because at Mody's suggestion--the pictures were clearly subversive, clearly pro-strike and therefore a challenge to British authority--Aurora did not sign them but simply placed a tiny drawing of a lizard in a corner of each sketch. Kekoo himself fully expected to be arrested, had decided he was happy to take the fall on Aurora's behalf (for he had been under her spell from their first meeting) and when he was not--when, in fact, the British chose to ignore the exhibition entirely--he took it as a further indication of the waning not only of their power but of their will. Tall, pale, awkward and majestically short-sighted, his round glasses almost thick-lensed enough to be bullet-proof, he paced around the Chipkali show waiting for the arrest that never came, took too many sips from an innocent-looking thermos flask which he had filled with cheap rum that was the same colour as strong tea, and buttonholed visitors to the gallery to expatiate at inordinate length on the Empire's imminent demise. Abraham Zogoiby--visiting the exhibition alone one afternoon, behind Aurora's back--took a different view. 'You art-wallahs,' he told Kekoo. 'Always so certain-sure of your impact. Since when do the masses come to such shows? And as for the Britishers, just now, kindly permit me to inform, pictures are not their problem.' For a time Aurora was proud of her alias, because she had indeed made of herself what she had wanted to be, an unblinking lizard on the wall of history, watching, watching; but when her pioneering work spawned followers, when other young artists began to act as public recorders and even began calling themselves the 'Chipkalist Movement', then, characteristically, my mother publicly disowned her disciples. In a newspaper article entitled 'I Am The Lizard' she admitted her authorship, defying the British to move against her (they did not) and dismissing her imitators as 'cartoonists and photographers'. 'The grand manner is all very well,' my father, reminiscing, commented in his old age. 'But it makes for a lonely life.' When Aurora Zogoiby heard that the Naval Strike Committee had been persuaded by the Congress leadership to call off the stoppage, and that it had convoked a meeting of the sailors to order them back to their posts, her disappointment with the world as it was burst its banks. Without thinking, without waiting for her driver Hanuman, she leapt into the curtained Buick and took off for the naval base. By the time she reached the Afghan Church in the Colaba Cantonment, however, the bubble of her invulnerability had burst, and she was beginning to have second thoughts about the wisdom of her journey. The road to the base was thick with defeated sailors, frustrated young men in clean uniforms and filthy moods, young men swirling listlessly like fallen leaves. Crows jeered in a plane-tree; a sailor picked up a stone and hurled it in the direction of the noise. Black forms fluttered contemptuously, circled, settled down, resumed their taunts. Police officers in short trousers muttered anxiously in small knots, like children afraid of punishment, and even my mother began to see that this was no place for a lady with a sketchbook and folding stool, let alone a gleaming Buick without so much as the protective presence of a chauffeur. It was a hot, humid, ill-tempered afternoon. A child's lilac kite, its string cut in some other lost battle, fell pathetically from the sky. Aurora did not need to lower her window to ask what was on the sailors' minds, because she was thinking the same things--that the Congress were acting like chamchas, toadies; that even now, when the British were too unsure of the army to send it in against the sailors, they could be sure that Congresswallahs would spare them the trouble of having to do so. When the masses actually do rise up, she thought, the bosses turn tail. Brown bosses, white bosses, it was the same thing. 'This strike has scare-o'ed our lot as much as theirs.' Aurora, too, was in a mutinous mood; but she was not a sailor, and knew that to those angry boys she would look like a rich bitch in a fancy car--as, perhaps, the enemy. The sullen, aimless thickening of the crowd had forced her to slow the Buick to walking pace, and when, with a gesture whose swift casualness concealed a frightening strength, one scowling young giant twisted the chrome housing of the Buick's wing-mirror until it hung uselessly off the car like a broken limb, she felt her heart begin to pound, and decided it was time to leave. Unable to turn round, she put the car into reverse; and realised, as she pushed the accelerator, that without the wing-mirror she was unable to check her rear on account of the intervening presence of green-and-gold cloth; that some sailors, in a final show of defiance, had suddenly decided to sit down in the road; and that, thanks to her growing, thumping feeling of alarm, she had accelerated harder than she intended, and was going much, much too fast. As she braked, she felt a small bump. Stories of Aurora Zogoiby being gripped by panic are rare, but this is one such tale: feeling the bump, my horrified mother, who had at once understood that someone had been staging a sit-down protest behind her car, column-shifted the Buick into first. The car leapt forward a few feet, thus passing bumpily over the stricken sailor's outstretched leg for a second time. At this moment several policemen, waving sticks and blowing whistles, raced towards the Buick, and Aurora, acting now in a kind of dream, motivated by some disoriented notion of guilt and escape, jerked the car into reverse once more. There was a third bump, although this time it was less noticeable than on the previous occasions. Shouts of rage mounted behind her, and, completely unhinged by the situation, she lurched forward again in a wild response to the cries--barely t c b n It C. c. b feeling the fourth bump--and knocked at least one policeman flat on his back. At this point, mercifully, the Buick stalled. What puzzled me most when I heard the story as a boy, what continues to perplex, is how, having more or less cut a man in two, she managed to get out of there in one piece. Aurora herself varied her explanations with each telling, attributing her escape, variously, to the disorientation of those unhappy sailors; or to some residue of naval discipline, which prevented them from becoming a lynch mob; or to the innate chivalry and sense of hierarchy of Indian men, which kept them from harming a lady, especially a grand one. Or, again, it might have been on account of her deep and evident concern--no grand manner there!--for the injured man, whose leg had taken on an upsetting resemblance to her dangling wing-mirror; or the result of the speed and habit of command with which she had him scooped up and placed on the Buick's back seat, where he was shielded from angry eyes by green-and-gold cloth while she pointed out to the assembled gathering that the injured man needed transport, and hers was the most readily available vehicle. The truth was that she had no idea why she was spared by that increasingly ugly crowd, but in her dark moments she perhaps came closest to the truth, admitting that she had been saved by fame; for her image was everywhere still, and with her beautiful young face and long white hair she wasn't hard to recognise. 'Tell your Congress friends they let us down,' someone shouted, and she shouted back, 'I will'; and then they let her go. (Some months later, pirouetting on the ramparts of her home, she kept her word, and let Jawaharlal Nehru have it straight. Soon after that, the Mountbattens arrived in India, and Nehru and Edwina fell in love. Is it too much to suppose that Aurora's plain speaking in the matter of the great naval strike turned Panditji away from her and towards the Last Viceroy's possibly less disputatious mame?) Abraham's version--Abraham, who had promised to look after her always--was different. Long after she died he confided in me. 'Back then I kept a top team secretly on her tail, and she led us a merry dance. I don't say it was so hard keeping your fool mummy safe when she went off on her madcap ventures, but I had to stay on my toes. Wherever that Buick turned up, my boys were also there. How could I inform her? If she knew she would have chewed me out.' It is difficult for me, after all these years, to know what to believe. How could Abraham have known that Aurora was going to dash off as she did?--But maybe it is her version that is suspect--perhaps her departure was not so precipitate, after all. The old biographer's problem: even when people are telling their own life stories, they are invariably improving on the facts, rewriting their tales, or just plain making them up. Aurora needed to seem independent; her version followed from that desire, just as Abraham's derived from his need to make the world think--to make me think--her safety depended on his care. The truth of such stories lies in what they reveal about the protagonists' hearts, rather than their deeds. In the case of the amputated sailor, however, the truth is simpler to establish: the poor fellow lost his leg. She brought him home and changed his life. She had diminished him, subtracting a leg and therefore his future in the navy; and now she sought fiercely to enlarge him again, providing him with a new uniform, a new job, a new leg, a new identity and a grumpy parrot to go with it all. She had ruined his life, but she saved him from the worst, gutter-dwelling, begging-bowl consequences of that ruination. As a result, he fell in love with her, what else; he became Lambajan Chandiwala as she desired, and the fabulous elephant-tales he told were his way of expressing his love, which was the impossible dog-devoted love of a slave for his queen, and which disgusted our sour and bony ayah and housekeeper Miss Jaya He, who became his bride and the bane of his life. 'Baap-re!' she berated him. 'Why not go on a salt march and don't stop when you reach the sea?' Lambajan at Aurora's gates--at the gates, as Vasco Miranda called them, of dawn--guarded his mistress from the coarse world outside, but he �was also, in a way, protecting others against her. Nobody entered until he knew their business; but Lamba also made it his own business to give visitors the benefit of his advice. 'Today speak soft only,' he might say. 'Today her head is full of whispers.' Or else: 'Dark thoughts are on her. You must tell good joke.' Thus forewarned, my mother's guests could (if they were wise enough to obey Lambajan's tips) avoid the supernova detonations of her legendary--and highly artistic--rage. My mother Aurora Zogoiby was too bright a star; look at her too hard and you'd be blinded. Even now, in the memory, she dazzles, must be circled about and about. We may perceive her indirectly, in her effects on others--her bending of other people's light, her gravitational pull which denied us all hope of escape, the decaying orbits of those too weak to withstand her, who fell towards her sun and its consuming fires. Ah, the dead, the unended, endlessly ending dead: how long, how rich is their story. We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep. Must we also die before our souls, so long suppressed, can find utterance--before our secret natures can be known? To whom it may concern, I say No, and